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How would SQLite fare in regards to your concerns? You won't have to 'spin up' a database and importing from various sources, AFAIK, is pretty easy these days (
by mercer 8y ago
How would SQLite fare in regards to your concerns? You won't have to 'spin up' a database and importing from various sources, AFAIK, is pretty easy these days (and OP even goes out of their way to deal with VARCHAR fields).
It strikes me as much easier than having to figure out Awk, but that's assuming most people are more likely to know SQL and/or use it in the future.
I mean, I'd be happy to try and solve the problem with Awk because it's been high on my list of things to learn, but SQL does seem like an easier solution in most cases.
- gjulianm 8y agoYou still have to create the SQLite database and have the client handy. Awk is there by default in all *nix systems, and for these basic tasks it's incredibly easy (see http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html for a quick intro). Once you know it you can use it to process a lot of text files in the console without any kind of worry. Maybe it's a preprocess step before importing data to a database, maybe you're just exploring a dataset, maybe you want to modify some command's output in the middle of a pipe. I learned awk a few years ago and it does not have equivalent when the only thing you want to do is to consume column-based text and do some simple processing: it is simple and incredibly fast.
- mercer 8y agoThanks for the link and the motivation to keep reading the AWK book I started a while ago!